For us here at CMS-Connected, new strategic partnerships and opportunities are really exciting for us, especially when we hear about them first-hand and can give our wonderful viewers exclusive intel.
With that being said, when we attended the ProgressNEXT 2018 event in Boston from May 29 – June 1st of this year, we were excited to hear about the new partnership between Progress Sitefinity and Ucommerce, a fully featured .NET based eCommerce platform.

Laura and I were eager to sit down with Søren Spelling Lund, Founder and CEO at Ucommerce and John Prachar, President at Ucommerce to hear all about the new announcement and as Sørenstated in our interview, the “exciting new capabilities” that this new partnership with Sitefinity and Ucommerce brings. Here’s what they had to say:

How the Integration Benefits Sitefinity Customers

Being in the business for almost 10 years now, Ucommerce from the very beginning, has been really driving CMS vendors to bring commerce capabilities to their platform. “Sitefinity is the fourth platform in a row. We do Sitecore, Umbraco and Kentico as well and for Sitefinity customers are really bringing more energy into the Sitefinity space because it has been a bit stagnant on the eCommerce side so now everyone can benefit from the awesome capabilities that we can provide.” stated Søren.

Additionally, in a recent blog post, Sørengoes into detail on what exactly the partnership brings to digital merchants worldwide stating “Progress Sitefinity partners will once again be able to bring full-blown eCommerce experiences to market on Sitefinity, which satisfy the increasing demands of digital merchants worldwide. More importantly, the partnership brings renewed energy and vigor to eCommerce in the Sitefinity ecosystem.

Certifications, know-how, apps, and customer cases can readily be leveraged with Sitefinity to open new, exciting opportunities.”

John Ainsworth, Senior Vice President, Core Products, Progress also commented on the news to say “We are thrilled to have Ucommerce join our partner community. Through this alliance, we’re advancing the ecommerce capabilities of Sitefinity giving customers yet another alternative to find the right solution for their online business needs. We look forward to working with Ucommerce, just as we do with all of our technology partners, to deliver an impactful digital solution for our customers.”

This unique content and commerce combination gives the power and muscles to create personalized shopping experiences for customers. With that said, here is a overview of specific capabilities that the Ucommerce for Sitefinity’s unique content and commerce combination together provides:

Enterprise Commerce - With the comprehensive set of enterprise commerce features and the advanced extendability of Ucommerce, you will have all the options to build large enterprise scale commerce solutions on Ucommerce.

Personalized Commerce - Through our Content and Commerce approach, Ucommerce will leverage all the features and capabilities of Sitefinity to create that personalized commerce experience that customers expect today.

Fast and easy time-to-market – Be ready to get to the value point faster and reduce your total cost of ownership by using some of the out-of-the-box features that you get with the Ucommerce platform.

Powerful Commerce Tools – Combine the strong personalization capabilities of Sitefinity, with all the commerce tools you need, such as campaigns, discounts, vouchers, gift cards and much more. Ucommerce will bring true commerce power to your Sitefinity installation.

Multi in every aspect – Ucommerce for Sitefinity is indeed “multi in every aspect” offering everything from multiple stores, multiple catalogs, multiple languages, multiple currencies, multiple price points to multiple shipments and much more

​Integration Friendly - A commerce project is never “an island”, but needs to be connected with all sorts of 3rd party systems. That is why, as part of the package, Ucommerce offers more than just open API’s, but a complete integration framework: Uconnector

Bringing Content and Commerce Together

Not only do you get a powerful .NET commerce-first platform, but now that it’s seamlessly integrated with Progress Sitefinity it gives the ability to create a powerful commerce solution with your CMS of choice.

As Søren explained in our interview “One of the really cool things about tying a CMS and a commerce platform together is that it’s interestingly easier to do multi-channel commerce or omni-channel commerce because of the inherent abilities to do multiple websites in a CMS and multiple stores in a commerce platform. So, when you need to do global ecommerce in multiple markets you would tend to have a website tied into each of the markets” Same goes for different types of ecommerce in the same platform, so either B2B or B2C, you are also able to use those same capabilities with your content management system “it works very beautifully within the CMS” said Søren.

As mentioned by John, introducing Progress Sitefinity into the Ucommerce ecosystem is going to really set the tone for a mutual and long term relationship. Working closely with the Progress team will benefit new capabilities and access to commerce opportunities within Ucommerce which Progress may not have had access to before. On that note, for customers already utilizing a Sitefinity version, the base cost is €5.999 per production server per year (market specific).

Ending Notes

It’s no surprise that commerce capabilities are becoming more paramount in the ever changing and emerging content space. As the integration of commerce into CRM, CMS and even Marketing software are becoming a more seamless process, developing a turn-key operation that helps customers make quicker decisions, and get ahead of competition in online sales is a prime example of this partnership.

That being said, every organization has their own unique goals and needs so finding the right technology and platform is not an easy task but with this new partnership, it’s combining the best of both worlds, in my opinion.

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.